That’s kinda always been how technology changes jobs, though, by slowly making the job one of supervising the technology. I’m no longer carving a piece of wood myself, but I’m running the CNC machine by making sure it’s doing things properly and has everything it needs to work properly. I’m not physically stabbing the needle through the fabric every time, myself, but I am guiding the sewing machine path on that fabric. I’m not feeding fuel into the oven to maintain a particular temperature, but I am relying on the thermocouple to turn the heating element on and off to maintain the assigned equilibrium that I’ll use to bake food.

Many jobs are best done as a team effort between human and machine. Offloading the tedious tasks to the machine so that you can focus on the bigger picture is basically what technology is for. And as technology changes, we need to always be able to recalibrate which tasks are the tedious ones that machines do better, and which are the higher level decisions best left to humans.

‘what if we did the same thing, but twice?’

That’s just a perfect way to describe it.

Why does this image look like an AI-generated screenshot? The letter spacing and weights are all wrong.

It’s like the relationship between mathematics and accounting. Sure, almost everything accountants do involve math in some way, but it’s relatively simple math that is a tiny subset of what all of mathematics is about, and the actual study of math doesn’t really touch on the principles of accounting.

Computer science is a theoretical discipline that can be studied without computers. It’s about complexity theory and algorithms and data structures and the mathematical/logical foundations of computing. Actual practical programming work doesn’t really touch on that, although many people are aware of those concepts and might keep them in the back of their mind while coding.

People who get downvoted a lot end up with a ‘low reputation’ indicator next to their name. You’ll know it when you see it.

Upvotes in meme communities do not add to reputation.

I think any kind of reputation score should be community specific. There are users whose commenting style fits one community but not another, and their overall reputation should be understood in the context of which communities actually like them rather than some kind of global average.

“I don’t want it to be like the butt of today’s jokes, I want it to be like the butt of 30-year-old jokes”

MacBook seamless suspend/sleep performance is like 25% of why my personal daily driver is MacOS. Another 50% is battery life, of which their sleep/suspend management plays a part. I’ve played around with Linux on Apple hardware but it’s just never quite been there on power management or sleep/wake functionality. Which is mostly Apple’s fault for poor documentation and support for other OS’s, but it just is, and I got sick of fighting it.

The Walkman and other tape players were so much superior to CD players for portability and convenience. Batteries lasted a lot longer for portable tape players than for CD players. Tapes could be remixed easily so you could bring a specific playlist (or 2 or 3) with you. Tapes were much more resilient than CDs. The superior audio quality of CDs didn’t matter as much when you were using 1980’s era headphones. Or, even if you were using a boombox, the spinning of a disc was still susceptible to bumps or movement causing skips, and the higher speed motor and more complex audio processing drained batteries much faster. And back then, rechargeable batteries weren’t really a thing, so people were just burning through regular single use alkaline batteries.

It wasn’t until the 90’s that decent skip protection, a few generations of miniaturization and improved battery life, and improved headphones made portable CDs competitive with portable tapes.

At the same time, cars started to get CD players, but a typical person doesn’t buy a new car every year, so it took a few years for the overall number of cars to start having a decent number of CD players.

They’re actually only about 48% accurate, meaning that they’re more often wrong than right and you are 2% more likely to guess the right answer.

Wait what are the Bayesian priors? Are we assuming that the baseline is 50% true and 50% false? And what is its error rate in false positives versus false negatives? Because all these matter for determining after the fact how much probability to assign the test being right or wrong.

Put another way, imagine a stupid device that just says “true” literally every time. If I hook that device up to a person who never lies, then that machine is 100% accurate! If I hook that same device to a person who only lies 5% of the time, it’s still 95% accurate.

So what do you mean by 48% accurate? That’s not enough information to do anything with.

Wouldn’t a louder room raise the noise floor, too, so that any quieter signal couldn’t be extracted from the noisy background?

If we were to put a microphone and recording device in that room, could any amount of audio processing be able to extract the sound of the small server out from the background noise of all the bigger servers? Because if not, then that’s not just a auditory processing problem, but a genuine example of destruction of information.

Yeah, you’re describing an algorithm that incorporates data about the user’s previous likes. I’m saying that any decent user experience will include prioritization and weight of different posts, on a user by user basis, so the provider has no choice but to put together a ranking/recommendation algorithm that does more than simply sorts all available elements in chronological order.

But also, you’re right. Here’s an article from 1994 describing Visicalc as a “Killer App” from the late 1970’s, that prompted people to buy personal computers.

“Killer rap” was pretty popular in the 90’s too.

It’s because Al Gore invented the internet, so they are known as Al Gore Rhythms.

Windows is the first thing I can think of that used the word “application” in that way, I think even back before Windows could be considered an OS (and had a dependency on MS-DOS). Back then, the Windows API referred to the Application Programming Interface.

Here’s a Windows 3.1 programming guide from 1992 that freely refers to programs as applications:

Common dialog boxes make it easier for you to develop applications for the Microsoft Windows operating system. A common dialog box is a dialog box that an application displays by calling a single function rather than by creating a dialog box procedure and a resource file containing a dialog box template.

Um excuse me the preferred term is “AI agent” if you want outside investment

Some people actively desire this kind of algorithm because they find it easier to find content they like this way.

Raw chronological order tends to overweight the frequent posters. If you follow someone who posts 10 times a day, and 99 people who post once a week, your feed will be dominated by 1% of the users representing 40% of the posts you see.

One simple algorithm that is almost always better for user experiences is to retrieve the most recent X posts from each of the followed accounts and then sort that by chronological order. Once you’re doing that, though, you’re probably thinking about ways to optimize the experience in other ways. What should the value of X be? Do you want to hide posts the user has already seen, unless there’s been a lot of comment/followup activity? Do you want to prioritize posts in which the user was specifically tagged in a comment? Or the post itself? If so, how much?

It’s a non-trivial problem that would require thoughtful design, even for a zero advertising, zero profit motive service.

Was that in 2000? My own vague memory was that Linux started picking up some steam in the early 2000’s and then branched out to a new audience shortly after Firefox and Ubuntu hit the scene around 2004, and actually saw some adoption when Windows XP’s poor security and Windows Vista’s poor hardware support started breaking things.

So depending on the year, you could both be right.

That’s why the best places to work tend to be the places where your CEO has had your job before.

As you can see from the sign, hard drive parking had not yet been invented.